Architecture

A History of New York City in 27 Buildings

AD spoke to New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts on how he selected the buildings in his forthcoming new book, and what lost landmarks he wishes were still in the Big Apple
aerial view of nyc
There are more than 700,000 buildings in New York City; a new book surveys 27 that altered the history of the city.Photo: Getty Images

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New York City has been in a constant state of construction since the very beginning. Throughout its history, the city has evolved into an architectural destination. With the 400th anniversary of the city’s founding right around the corner, it’s the perfect time to explore the buildings that make up the Big Apple’s iconic skyline, as well as the lesser known structures you won’t find in guidebooks. In the forthcoming new book A History of New York in 27 Buildings (Bloomsbury, October 22), New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the stories of the city’s most important architectural works and the people who made them possible.

But the book isn’t simply construction stories. Rather, Roberts delves into the events that occurred within the walls of these buildings to explain why they hold such an important place in the city’s history. From a monument to 19th-century corruption to the site of the first meeting of the United Nations (which just so happens to be a gymnasium in the Bronx), these 27 buildings are part of what makes New York such a fascinating place. Roberts spoke with AD about choosing which buildings would make the cut, the things he was surprised to learn, and what facet of the city he plans to tackle next.

Architectural Digest: You note that there are more than 700,000 buildings in New York City. How do you even start the research process for a book like this?

Sam Roberts: First, the 27 represent my list, not the list. The point of this book, like my earlier 101 Objects, is to be evocative, to make people who take for granted what’s within their purview every day think about history in new ways. I solicited suggestions from architectural historians, curators, and architects; mined invaluable sources like Stokes’s Iconography of Manhattan Island and other 19th- and 20th-century books; and consulted my own voluminous records from covering New York for more than 50 years. That brought the number down to about 10,000.

AD: As you narrowed down the list, what qualifications did you use for the final selection? What made these 27 feel worthy of inclusion?

SR: I began with several criteria: The buildings had to still exist, so people could see or visit them. Except for a few icons that have become global symbols of the city, I looked for quirky, singular structures (some loosely defined as “buildings”) that you wouldn’t find in typical tourist guidebooks or displayed on picture postcards. Instead, they needed to be transformative in some way or emblematic of a metamorphic era or event in the city’s history.

St. Paul's Chapel as seen in 1965.

Photo: Getty Images/Archive Photos

St. Paul's Chapel in 2017.

Photo: Getty Images/Anthony DelMundo

AD: How did you land on 27 buildings instead of, say, 25 or 30?

SR: The truth? I was aiming for 25, miscounted, and wound up with 26. Then my publisher, Bloomsbury, suggested that I also include the Flatiron, the elegant skyscraper—which happens to be its headquarters—whose prow appears poised to be propelled up Fifth Avenue from Madison Square. My editor stopped me there, or I could have added dozens more.

AD: Were there some buildings that you were close to including? Why didn’t they make the cut?

SR: My History book was never intended to be complete or comprehensive. The challenge was in whittling the list down from those that had been declared worth saving by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and those that for one reason or another were not: Either they were forgotten; their significance in the city’s evolution had been overlooked; or they were deemed, solely by architectural criteria, incidental. When people suggest one I left out, I tell them it would have been the 28th.

AD: Are there any New York buildings that are now gone that you wished you could have included?

SR: Lost landmarks? In a city that has expanded its borders primarily by landfill since 1898—not by annexation like metropolises in the Southwest—and that perpetually recycles its real estate, the litany is funereal. Start with Pennsylvania Station. At least its demolition, beginning in 1963, triggered precedent-setting legal protections that spared other architectural treasures worth preserving not only in New York, but around the nation. Add to that much-missed list, for starters the old Metropolitan Opera House, the original Madison Square Garden, the Singer Building, Ebbets Field, the Vanderbilt Mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the New York World Building, Lüchow’s Restaurant, and the Biltmore Hotel.

Grand Central Terminal in 1913.

Photo: Courtesy of Irving Underhill, 1913

Grand Central Terminal in 2018.

Photo: Getty Images/Jordi de Rueda

AD: The list includes some of the city’s most famous landmarks, such as Grand Central Terminal and the Empire State Building. What building do you think should be more celebrated than it is?

SR: Each of the 27 in the book, I hope, delivers unique insights about a city so consumed by its present and future that it rarely takes the time to pause and consider the impact of its past. Who knew that billions of dollars in currency was being produced in the poorest community in the country? That Brooklyn was home to the nation’s biggest sugar refinery? That New York’s is the oldest continuously operating city hall in America? Or, that two buildings, one in the Bronx and another in Manhattan, can arguably be described as where the Depression and the New Deal, respectively, began? While a neglected townhouse still exists where a president of the United States was actually inaugurated, perhaps the city’s most disregarded building is Federal Hall—not only the site of the nation’s first Capitol, where Washington was sworn in, but the symbol of New York’s ascendancy to the capital of maritime commerce and of capitalism.

George Washington's statue in front of Federal Hall on Wall Street.

Photo: Getty Images

AD: You’ve written extensively on New York throughout your career at the Times and in your books. Is there anything that you were surprised to learn while putting this book together?

SR: Covering urban affairs for the Times has been like being paid to get a graduate degree. My job indulges my curiosity in a city where the only constant is change. I’ve learned how our Dutch heritage made New York unique, how the city’s rich 400-year history has engineered who and what we are today. Writing about artifacts and buildings turns out to be a lot like writing biographies: You are looking behind the veneer of inanimate objects and discovering that they have lives of their own. Churchill put it better. “We shape our buildings,” he said. “Thereafter they shape us.”

AD: You write about some of New York’s best-known historical figures, such as Boss Tweed, as well as people that readers may not be familiar with. Who were the lesser-known people you knew you wanted to highlight?

SR: Like the buildings in the book, I found so many fascinating people eclipsed by our obsession with celebrity. To name a few: John Jay, who agreed to become secretary of state only if Congress moved the nation’s capital to New York; A.T. Stewart, who invented the department store; John B. Jervis, a self-taught engineer who masterminded the construction of the city’s water supply system; Andrew H. Green, who more than anyone deserves to be magnified as the father of greater New York; Langdon Post, who built the first public, low-income housing project in the nation; and Paul Antonio, a Greek immigrant carpenter from Manhattan who cast the first ballot in the United Nations Security Council.

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AD: What is it about New York that has led you to build your career around reporting on it and its history?

SR: When one of the students in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys is asked by his teacher to define history, he pauses for a moment and replies, more or less, “It’s one damn thing after another.” Too often history is taught by rote and students are rated on their skill at memorizing names, places, dates. Its relevance to current events is overlooked. I’ve made history into front-page news: On the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, I read his first mate’s log and linked the first recorded murder in New York to the contemporary debate over racial profiling—naturally, the Dutch sailors blamed it on a Native American. News coverage needs context. To quote Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

AD: You’ve covered New York through its artifacts (A History of New York in 101 Objects), its citizens (Only in New York), and now its buildings. What aspect of the city do you want to explore next?

SR: Spoiler alert: As we’re poised for the city’s quadricentennial, I’m hoping to be able to write a historical narrative told through about 20—maybe 27—New Yorkers whose lives were transformative or who epitomized a transcendent era—and whom most readers have never heard of. Nominations are still open and welcome: samrob@nytimes.com.